Complete Visibility of Tsunami-Like Cyber Attacks

Ixia (NASDAQ: XXIA) provides converged Internet Protocol (IP) network validation and network visibility solutions. Founded in 1997, the company has a current market cap of Rs. 5,874.53 crore (Approx.)

Most of the cyber attacks are like tsunamis. It is very tough to predict the direction and the magnitude of the attack approaching. Finding blind spots is the biggest challenge faced by the security professionals in companies nowadays. This can be eliminated by complete visibility, which is fairly nascent in India. Companies usually conduct small audit and they never test a network at full attack and application load. But by maintaining visibility into production network, these companies can monitor and maintain visibility of those networks from end-to-end to the applications running, all the way out to the edge of the networks for the users to suite that application traffic, in both physical and virtual alike.

This helps the companies from a security stand point by maintaining visibility of that entire transaction, thus eliminating the blind spots that exist there, especially in the virtual data centers. It will also enhance the performance of the network to live up to the expectations of the users' stand point.

It is about Reputation, Not Money
Most of the companies are more in a reactive mode rather a proactive mode. This is due to their lack of knowledge about the steps to be taken to prevent such incidents making them more vulnerable to cyber attacks. They wait for the event to occur, rather than fixing it up at that point of time.

One of the common areas prone to cyber attack is the Banks. Recently, the server in an established bank in India was attacked leading the server down for more than three days. The bank was more worried about the reputation tarnished than the money lost. We are working with them to test the infrastructure to make sure they are resilient to cyber attacks and also make them ready to look at the network and understand from where a cyber attack is taking place and what the signs of it are.

Most of the banks and financial institutions spend a lot of money on putting the network infrastructure together, but they do not have a clear understanding of how secure their network infrastructure actually is. The resiliency scores of the network can actually be measured by bombarding them with tests, malwares and so on, and then give them a feeling of insurance.

Network and IT organizations are engaged in a cycle of deploying new services, supporting new use cases and managing growth. Ixia's architecture and tools help them to have a complete vision of the network and make sure they have a better understanding of the network in terms of different elements, applications and devices that are connected to the network. For example, in the network vision solutions, the monitoring becomes so refined that you get to see what you exactly like to see and there is no duplication. These tools help the telcos to look at the network in a more refined way and take steps to correct any imbalances.

Educating Market and Customers
Currently educating the market and the customers are one of the biggest confrontations. We are contributing towards this through a lot of marketing initiatives, seminars and road shows to build the awareness before the tsunami-like cyber attacks. We are also engaged in educating the channel partners to bring the solutions to our customers and implement more proactive solutions.

With the launch of 4G in India, pressure on the network is constantly on rise. The mobile internet business is becoming rapid with every increasing number of customers using it. Customer experience is the key component to measure the success of a network thus propelling them to invest heavily to enhance this user experience and have started taking the testing tools more seriously.(As told to Susila Govindaraj)